Jake & I had the house to ourselves today, Jennifer being at an all-day quilter retreat.
We watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (in small pieces throughout the day), did the weekly grocery shopping, and made a mess of the house.
Finally downloaded pictures from the digital camera: some nice ones from the parade, and of Thanksgiving dinner, and —from way back on the 22nd—a really nice one of Jacob that Jennifer took.
In Peoria for the Christmas parade.
Looks like I'm wearing a kilt, doesn't it?
We have no Thanksgiving leftovers in the house: the first time in many years we've all come home empty-handed.
I suppose one of these years we'll be inviting people to our house for Thanksgiving, and we'll be the ones trying to give away leftovers.
In Bloomington, for Thanksgiving dinner & family time. Jake had all four grandparents on hand, which was nice.
[I don't know why I use “Bloomington”. Jennifer's parents live in Normal.]
Left Jake with the grandparents and went to see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Cold this morning—19°, 21°, something like that. Jake wore his spiffy new winter coat; I'm still in summer clothes, though I've added a sweatshirt. People stare at me like I'm really weird for wearing shorts.
Bah. Twenty years ago I abandoned the notion of clothing as decoration: now I'm interested only in comfort. Being cold doesn't bother me nearly so much as being too warm, and my office at dear old WRI is always too warm. (I've set the thermostat as low as it will go—48°!—and the temperature in here is still 76°.)
There's been a request from the loyal readership for less geekstuff, more “personal information”.
Um. Like what?
Geekstuff (sorry): poking around the CNN web site, I found an article link headlined, “Andreessen on what's next”: Marc Andreessen offers a cogent analysis of what's happening in business IT. And underneath: a discreet little banner ad, Sponsored by Microsoft.
It made me chuckle. Andreessen once bragged that he would reduce Microsoft to irrelevance, now it's paying for his column inches.
Mail from the boss: my vacation request, December 16th to January 3rd, has been approved. How nice. If the weather holds up, and everybody stays healthy, I plan to do some genealogical research trips: to Indianapolis, to Springfield, maybe even to Carmi.
If you tell Internet Explorer to delete all offline content, you lose all the cute icons in the Favorites list. My Favorites list is boring again, alas.
Supposed to be four inches of snow on the ground by 5:00pm. I don't care, I wore shorts today anyway. I might regret this while cleaning off the car tonight.
Brought some CDs to work today: the mind-numbing classical music just got too...er...mind-numbing.
David Gerrold wrote a lengthy essay about classical music (I wish I could find the URL), arguing that it's supposed to evoke powerful emotional reactions in listeners, that it did in the days before movies and television.
It doesn't have that effect on me. It's just background noise.
I wonder how hard it would be to index these pages. XHTML is supposedly easily parsed....
Listening to Bob Geldof's The Vegetarians of Love:
I'm thinking about mortality
I'm thinking it's a cheap price that we pay for existence
2:00pm, and no snow.
A quote:
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
—Albert Einstein
A rebuttal:
They laughed at Newton.
They laughed at Einstein.
They laughed at Bozo the Clown.
2:45pm, and snow is falling. None on the ground yet.
Bob Geldof has a web site: www.bobgeldof.info. And a new album.
[I suppose it's in the .info domain because bobgeldof.com was already taken—by a rather lame fan site. Poor Bob.]
Never did get any snow.
Poor Jake, his bath came to an abrupt end when he crash-landed on something sharp and gashed his eye: scary, at first, but nothing serious. No emergency room visit, no stitches. He doesn't look like Borje Salming.
Cold this morning, with just enough snow to cover the lawns and rooftops. Wispy clouds, very high, with just a few thicker ones scudding along at lower altitudes.
Jacob wore his new winter coat. I think he enjoyed it. The ride to daycare is usually quiet, but today we had a conversation:
“Yo, Jake, okay back there?”
“Uh-huh.”
Poked around a bit in the Illinois State Archives page. The Statewide Death Index, previously available only on microfilm over at the library, is now online: so I fed it the usual set of names (Bolerjack, Burkhardt, Dean, Felty, Maurer).
The plan is to see which death certificates I already have, then set about completing my collection.
A quote:
“Customers tell us the practice of asking them for names and addresses is time consuming and annoying and is not something that endears them to us,” Leonard Roberts, chairman and CEO of Fort Worth-based RadioShack, said in a statement.
<pedant>
He should be more concerned with endearing Radio Shack
to its customers, not the other way around.
</pedant>
Another quote:
How many quality programming hours are you able to squeeze in an 8 hour work day. I am lucky if I can get four hours, and I am feeling quite guilty.
Robert A. Heinlein set himself a daily quota: five pages of pay copy per day. However long it took, he'd write five pages and stop. That doesn't seem like very much—but assuming five working days per week, with an annual two-week vacation, it comes to 1,250 pages. That's at least two or three novels' worth. So it's not how many hours you work that counts, it's what you get done.
(I'm sure the loyal readership, loyal though they be, are glad that the Daybook isn't five pages per day.)
Looks like today will be the first of the season to stay below freezing the whole 24 hours: the high for today was 31° at 2:00pm. Just now (9:38pm) it's 25° and falling.
Weatherdroids predicted falling temperatures today, with rain in the afternoon turning to snow by midnight (but less than an inch accumulation).
According to sputnik, the temperature at 4:00 is the same as it was at 10:00am (40°). No rain in sight, let alone snow.
Raked some leaves in the back yard this morning; Jake helped by carrying leaves around. Sometimes he even put them in the wheelbarrow. (Other times he took them out of the pile.)
Trying another crock-pot recipe: throw in a bunch of dried fruit with a little honey, hot water & allspice; percolate five or six hours; put on ice cream. Sounds tasty.
Realized that the weather station was still on Daylight Saving Time, and the database had a month of incorrect timestamps in it. Easily fixed:
UPDATE conditions SET
conditions.time = DateAdd("h",-1,conditions.time),
conditions.time_zone = "CST"
WHERE (((conditions.id)>=19361));The dried-fruit recipe—officially it's a compote, but I can't bring myself to use the word: it looks like a misspelling—is very tasty on vanilla ice cream.
Bit of a sore throat this evening. Very lethargic. Perhaps I'm coming down with a cold or something.
Network problems: nessus says the cable is unplugged, and the base station says, “Computer? What computer?”. I don't even have two computers on my network, and it's already broken. Sigh.
The temperature continues to fall: 32° at 9:00pm, but no sign yet of rain or snow.
Off to Bloomington this morning, for a visit with Natalie & Lily.
Lunch at Baker's Square (in Bloomington) afterward; poor Jake was very sleepy and not at all interested in eating lunch, sitting in the high chair, or even being in the restaurant at all. It was not a leisurely meal.
He slept most of the way home, then went into his crib without waking up.
How many copies of the “Scientist Burns [censored] With Laptop Computer” email have you received? (One would be too many, trust me.)
Today's entry in the Forgotten English calendar claims that D. B. Cooper, hijacker extraordinaire, was really one Dwayne Weber. There's nothing on the FBI web site about it, so I assume the Bureau has its own opinion.
I'm just surprised that I had to read about this in a calendar: if true, it would have been Big News, hard to avoid.
(Then again, in the 1950s some crackpot claimed to be John Dillinger. He even sent letters to the FBI: You thought you killed me in 1934, but you didn't, nyahh nyahh nyahh. So far as I know, he was ignored.)
[See also August 1, 2003.]
Did a little genealogical data mining this evening: going over old obituaries to see whether I missed anything. (I did.) I need another research trip to Carmi, to visit a few more cemeteries (Mt. Olive, Barth, etc.) and look up a few things in the courthouse. Won't be any time soon; maybe in the spring.
The Personal Ancestral File (version 5.2.18.0) date calculator tells me that on Christmas Eve of this year—that is, thirty days from today—I will be the age my grandmother was when my brother was born.
That makes me feel old.
Jerry Pournelle says:
...some of you may be young enough to remember everything you ever knew. I assure you that won't last.
Very true. Once upon a time, I knew which books I had in my library, which CDs were in my collection; shopping for more was easy, because I knew what I already had.
These days, I'm in trouble if I don't bring a printed list to the store with me.
Jennifer thinks I should get out more: to the Prairie Zen Center (www.prairiezen.org) or the Champaign County Genealogical Society (www.rootsweb.com/~ilccgs). I don't know that I have the energy for such things.
I encounter the phrase 'my people' often enough, in interviews, opinion pieces, that sort of thing. Usually, the speaker is expressing outrage at various injustices his people have suffered over the centuries, and dropping hints that increased federal funding to himself or to the organization he leads just might make up for it.
Sometimes I ask myself, Who are my people?
I don't really have a 'people'. I have a family, I have American citizenship, my ancestors came from a few specific places in Europe—but none of these means to me quite what is meant by those who refer to their 'people'.
I just don't get it.
Maybe it's a self-esteem thing. I'm not just me, I'm part of a whole people, so you should take me seriously.
(Remember how much trouble Ross Perot got into in 1992 for referring to an NAACP convention audience as 'you people'?)
Not a good week for resisting temptation: stopped at Best Buy on the way home and bought the MN-500 base station thingy. Now I have two-thirds of the Really Cool Wireless Home Network: nessus and the base station can toss packets back & forth, but pox and the iPaq are still out in the cold.
Soon, soon. All good things happen in time.
Jennifer & I had the notion that we might have dinner at the new Baker's Square (which just opened in the old Denny's near the mall); alas, most of town had the same notion, only a few minutes earlier: it was so crowded even the parking lot was full. People were parking in any stray bit of unoccupied pavement.
Plan B: the food court at the mall. I don't know why people go to food courts—it can't be for the food. In this case, it was so Jake could ride the carousel. He enjoyed that.
Hooked up the wireless base station, so random passers-by can snoop around in nessus. (No, not really: I turned on all the security settings. And nessus spends most of the day turned off anyway.)
Microsoft really wants the MN-500 to be used with a cable modem or DSL connection. The manual is full of warnings about things that won't work without a high-bandwidth internet connection. A few paragraphs toward the end grudgingly admit that a high-bandwidth blah blah blah isn't really required to set up a home network.
I was worried for a while that I had wasted my money....
[I suppose with Christmas only thirty-three days away I shouldn't be buying myself toys. Sorry, Santa. I'll stop now.]
Everybody slept all night long. How nice.
Cold today; rain most of the afternoon, with a little snow mixed in to remind us that Winter Is Coming Soon.
Two discoveries:
Created a Mathematica notebook with some formulas for creating a sundial. It seems to work, sort of. Maybe someday I will polish it up and create a real sundial for the back yard. (Jennifer fills the yard with flowers & landscaping; I fill it with random geekstuff: weather stations, sundials, etc.)
Terrible craving for greasy rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. Will I give in to temptation? Stay tuned!
“I can resist anything but temptation.”
Difficult night last night: poor Jake kept waking up, nose all stuffed up and (loudly) unhappy about it. Around 1:00am we gave him some Dimetapp, which seemed to help.
The pitiless alarm went off at 6:00am anyway.
Poking around the NASA Human Spaceflight page, spaceflight.nasa.gov: on May 5, 1961, Alan B. Shepard flew a Mercury capsule into orbit; twenty years later, on April 12, 1981, Young & Crippen flew the Space Shuttle Columbia into orbit. To go from Mercury to Shuttle in only twenty years seems like pretty good progress.
But twenty years after Columbia's first flight, the shuttle fleet is still flying. And NASA is laying plans to keep them flying another twenty years. The thought of flying a forty-year-old spacecraft would be funny, if it weren't sad.
I suppose NASA would say, “Look at all the improvements we've made since 1981.” Maybe so—but they haven't made any of the big ones: cost to orbit (which should be a few orders of magnitude lower than it is), turnaround time from landing to next launch (which should be measured in days, not months), etc., etc., blah blah blah.
Associated Press reports:
Two women's groups and a media watchdog organization on Tuesday asked CBS not to air the Victoria's Secret fashion show, calling it a “soft-core porn infomercial.”
No. Really?
It's hard to care about supermodels in skimpy clothing. I'm sure they're nice enough people, but what's the point? There might be some pitiful few teenaged boys out there, who keep getting carded at the local naughty-video store and whose parents won't let them explore the sleazier corners of the internet, who find themselves reduced to watching TV-14 rated porn disguised as a fashion show. But that's a pretty narrow demographic for CBS to pursue.
My Windows XP user profile—Desktop, Favorites, email, etc.—got trashed at work yesterday morning; ever since, I've been slowly recreating it.
I've noticed that when I add sites to my new Favorites list,
Internet Explorer now includes the favicon.ico image
in the Favorites menu. This hardly ever happened with the old
Favorites list—and when it did, the image would usually
disappear without warning.
Now my Favorites menu is a little more colorful. That's nice.
Warm & soggy for most of last night, but cold this morning: the low for the night was 31°, at 7:00am (also 8:00 and 9:00, for that matter).
Sputnik hasn't lost any data in a while. I had thought the battery was going, but apparently not. Interference?
Fooled around a bit with Linux this evening: figured out how to
point http://localhost/~pat/ at ~/public_html.
It's easy: just add
UserDir disable
UserDir enable pat
UserDir public_htmlto the Apache configuration file (the name of which escapes me
at present). If, on the other hand, you try to do this with Red
Hat's httpd configuration tool, you will not succeed: the posh GUI
configurator provides no way to set UserDir.
But in the end it's working, and I even wrote a (very) small PHP test page. Seems Red Hat Linux 8.0 ships with PHP 4.2.2, which is considerably newer than the version I use at WRI. Perhaps I should ask for an upgrade.
(I like what PHP does, but the language itself—not to mention the vast and completely unorganized collection of library functions—leaves a lot to be desired.)
My first impression of Linux—of Red Hat 8.0, at least—is that much of what I do with Windows could just as easily be done with Linux. Alas, there's no Linux version of CityDesk.
Weatherdroids predicted rain all day; there was none.
Not much time at work for woolgathering (or Daybook-blathering) today. Instead, I was rewriting a C# program. Lots of nice XML-processing toys in the .NET framework—very convenient when one's supervisor has a mania for XML.
I see that byte.com is going to start charging for access: $12 per year, or no more Chaos Manor columns. It seems the banner ads just weren't pulling in the revenue.
salon.com tried that a few years ago, and their readership spanked them soundly: readers stayed away in droves (as the saying goes), and they had to stop charging. (This really annoyed the few suckers who actually paid up.)
$12 per year isn't so much, really. The problem is that I dislike paying for something so ephemeral as a web site: a magazine I can leave on the shelf for a week, or a month, and read it when I have time. Some web sites make a point of keeping everything online, but others drop articles after only a few days.
And I don't suppose the all-subscription byte.com will have fewer, or less intrusive, advertisements.
[Salon.com is free again, but their site is infested by annoying interstitials—if you thought that link went to an article, you thought wrong: it goes to an ad. After a while, Salon.com graciously allows you to read the article, which itself is littered with advertisements. I knew there was a reason I removed that bookmark....]
Set Jennifer up with the trial version of CityDesk: her new web page is at www.netcom.com/~tiglash. Go there, it's nice.
(Jennifer's Christmas list includes a “French purse”. Curiously, this phrase appeared many times in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, but never in reference to a handbag.)
Feeling much better today. Thanks for asking!
Lunch was at Applebee's, where Jake drank milk from a straw. He must have learned that at daycare—he's never used a straw at home.
Poor Jennifer is outside, mowing the lawn one last time before winter sets in. Jake is officially having a nap (though in reality protesting at great volume his sleeplessness). I am poking around on the computer.
An article in yesterday's paper predicted a warmer than average winter, just like last year. I wouldn't mind.
A bit of cleanup over in the Weather section: removed the yearly index files, and merged the chart page into the main index. Now all I have to do is drop new charts into the appropriate directory, and the rest is automatic.
(The transparent part of the sputnik image—which was so difficult to create—causes text-flow weirdness in Internet Explorer: the text nestles right up against the non-transparent parts of the image, instead of staying outside the 110x210 image box. Maybe it's supposed to do that—but I didn't want it to, so a bit of HTML cruft was thrown at it to make things come out right. I'll regret this later, I'm sure.)
A fairly simple way to crash CityDesk: use the global search function to search all articles for some text (say, for the word “transparent”); open a few of the matching articles by double-clicking on them in the search results pane (then close them again); then close the search window. Thud.
Home improvement follies:
Nailed a curtain rod up in Jake's room, to replace the spring-loaded one that didn't quite reach across the window (hence had to be wedged in at an angle to keep it from falling down). The idea is this will keep the morning sun from waking him up, and let us all sleep a little longer.
Tried to hang a windowshade behind the curtain; alas, it's about a half-inch narrower than the window frame. We thought maybe we could use a couple of shims, but that didn't work too well: they split. And I hung the shade backwards anyway.
Better luck next time.
Reinstalled Linux. This time I was brave & allowed GRUB to take over boot-loader duties. It works pretty well—at least, Linux and Windows are bootable. It even let me choose the SMP kernel, so Linux sees both processors now.
Curiously, the shutdown process no longer powers down the machine. It did before....
Not feeling so well today. Mr Thermometer says 101.5°; Jennifer says I have dark circles under my eyes. I dunno—I think I look as ghastly as always.
Creative Labs tech support says, in regard to their modem drivers:
Until we are able to release a driver update, I recommend continuing to use the default drivers. Sorry about the trouble.
Well, that's helpful.
The sounds of weeping & wailing (and perhaps a little gnashing of teeth) are heard in Champaign: Jake's eye is once more gunked up. He's had a cold lately; maybe that's why.
I'm tempted to reinstall Linux, and let the Red Hat installer set up GRUB properly. There's nothing much on the Linux side of things yet, except 40MB of downloads from the Red Hat Update site. I have a working modem now, I can download it all again.
Finished reading To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein's last novel. My copy—purchased new in 1987—is already yellowed & brittle. Disappointing.
Windows Explorer isn't so bright when it comes to copying files. Something that would take xcopy a few minutes will bog Explorer down so badly that it takes ten times as long.
Or longer:
185,927 minutes is 129 days, 2 hours, 47 minutes, which means my copy should finish around 6:00pm, March 22, 2003. Egad.
Fooling around a bit with Linux, trying to get rid of the boot floppy. It was relatively easy to pull the boot sector off the floppy and patch it into the Windows 2000 boot loader, but I'm having problems getting GRUB (the GRand Unified Boot loader) configured properly.
(One thing to remember with Linux is that there's a lot of documentation floating around—and most of it is wrong. Is the GRUB configuration file /etc/grub.conf, or is it /boot/grub/grub.conf?)
I should have let the Red Hat installer set it up for me. I suppose I could reinstall Linux, but that would mean another 39MB of downloads from the Red Hat update site.
Geekstuff: the nice people at Socket have an 802.11b card for the iPaq. This would be useful at work, sort of, in that I could connect to the WRI network; and useful at home, once the router thingy is in place.
Alas, all these network toys are expensive:
| Network Toys | |
|---|---|
| Microsoft MN-500 Wireless Base Station | $150.00 |
| Microsoft MN-520 Wireless Notebook Card | $80.00 |
| Socket Low Power Wireless LAN Type I Card | $160.00 |
| Total: | $390.00 |
It's Lotto night: tonight's jackpot is only $3,000,000, but that should be enough for a nice home network.
Oops: Mozilla doesn't render my picture-frame tables correctly: the caption appears in the right place (centered), but the image is against the left margin.
Mozilla also renders text very small compared to Internet Explorer, for a given point size. I suspect this is because X assumes a different dpi for the screen than does Windows. I wonder if there's a non-ugly way to get decent-sized text on both browsers. (Probably not.)
Interesting software: ImageWalker, www.imagewalker.com. It's an image management tool, and creates thumbnails, web pages, etc., etc., blah blah blah. And it doesn't cost much, only $20. (Though registration is optional; unscrupulous types like myself can enjoy a ‘trial period’ that never ends.)
I don't suppose it would work too well with CityDesk, though.
(ImageWalker was written by Zac Walker, who lives in London; I found it through a link on ceej's web site. She lives in California. The world is shrinking.)
More geekstuff: the Windows Powered Smart Display. Instead of carting an entire computer around the house, just carry a flat-panel display that talks to the computer via wireless networking.
Alas, it only works with Windows XP, so I'm locked out.
In today's mail: the Davis Instruments 2003 Catalog, full of expensive weather machineries.
Perhaps I should look for a replacement battery for sputnik, which has been having problems talking to the base station. Many gaps in the data over the last few weeks, alas.
The Linux side of nessus is only running on one CPU. (Even so, it's about as responsive as Windows 2000 on two CPUs.) I need to switch to the SMP kernel, but I can't find out how to do this. I'm reasonably sure it's possible....
Last night, Jacob kept saying, “Bus?” Finally, Jennifer figured out that he wanted us to sing the song:
The wheels on the bus go round and round
Round and round
Round and round
The wheels on the bus go round and round
All through the town
When we did—when Jennifer did; I'm shy about singing in front of other people—Jacob started doing the hand motions that go with the verses. It was cute.
Saw a farmhouse the other day with laundry hanging on a line in the front yard; nothing unusual about that, but next to the laundry were hanging three dead raccoons and a dead weasel.
A warning to others of their kind? The work of an amateur taxidermist?
In today's email, a reminder from the WRI sysadmin department:
Please note that temp-store is
for temporary storage and is not backed up.
They send out one of these every few months. Each time, they seem
just a little surprised that people are using temp-store
for permanent storage.
One time, a fool—who shall remain nameless, but who is no
longer with the company and isn't missed—complained that he
had been keeping Really Important Files in temp-store,
and they had all disappeared.
Disk space is a finite resource, and must be managed carefully. The people who don't realize this are the ones who never seem to have enough, and who end up scavenging the network for more.
Tried again to install the network card. If you install the software first, then the network card, Windows 2000 is happy.
Poor Mr. Network Adapter doesn't have anybody to talk to just yet, but I'm working on it.
Jeff Duntemann contemplates his earlier self:
Egad. I was crusty, twitchy, snide, and more callous than I recall. But worse than that, I was stupid. I wrote lightweight stuff without much depth, with high-school sophistication and obvious failures of logic. My ideas were thin gruel.
Or, as Neil Peart put it:
What a fool I used to be
People have been telling me for decades how smart I am. I'm too aware of my defects—the ones bedeviling me now, not twenty years ago—to believe them.
Yesterday's paper had an article about Gunflint Lodge, www.gunflint.com. Very nice, but the prices—$400 per person per day, ouch.
(Expensive, yes—but I've learned that parsimony makes for a poor vacation. It's a vacation. Indulge yourself.)
They have a webcam, with a nice view of Gunflint Lake.
Reading about Microsoft's network hardware: the network adapter is only $25, which is remarkably cheap. I'd run right out to buy one, but I'm worried that this is the network equivalent of the WinModem: minimal hardware, wasteful of CPU time, and (worst of all) works only on Windows.
Microsoft's web site is silent on the subject of Linux; Red Hat's Hardware Compatibility List hasn't been updated; I can't find anything in the newsgroups. Very frustrating.
A quote, regarding pop-up ads:
In fact, in certain situations they can be very powerful. If you get a pop-up ad from Orbitz that gives you a great deal to a place you need to fly, odds are you're going to click on it.
A response: I loathe pop-up ads. I never read them. I do my best to close the window even before the page has finished rendering. Companies with something to sell will have to find a less annoying way to get my attention, or I will never even know they exist.
Hardware follies:
Bought a modem yesterday: a Creative Labs Modem Blaster V.92 (model DE5621).
Bought a network card this afternoon: a Microsoft MN-130. It was only $25, I couldn't resist.
This afternoon, I set about installing my new toys. I removed the old modem, then installed the network card (even the Wake-On-LAN cable).
The network card drivers installed readily enough, but any attempt to invoke them caused Windows 2000 to lock up, dead as a hammer. (That's not supposed to be possible.)
Much foolery & frustration, followed by removal of the network card. I imagine I'll return it tomorrow.
Installed the modem: much easier, as it's an external. The drivers installed readily enough, but any attempt to use the modem—wait for it—caused Windows 2000 to lock up, dead as a hammer.
After much foolery & frustration, I discovered that Windows' generic modem drivers work just fine. Should I return the modem, too? Or pester Creative Labs for drivers that work?
Jake and I have the day to ourselves: Jennifer is off quilting.
The modem on nessus is increasingly unreliable. I managed to upload yesterday's web page changes, then the connection dropped. It reconnects readily enough, but only for a minute or two: not long enough to upload to Pair.com.
This is annoying enough that I'm tempted to spend $100 on a new modem.
Another HTML cleanup project: all through the
Daybook, there are img tags inside p
tags. This is a Bad Thing, and must be corrected.
(Then I can get back to the task of separating the old Daybook pages into one page per day, instead of one page per month. What fun that will be.
Hill Ford says, “You need a new thermostat. $140, please.”
CNN.com says:
Two new digital audio disc formats touted by the music industry for their stellar sound are nowhere near as consumer-friendly as regular old CDs.
The two formats in question, Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio, weren't created to improve sound quality: they were created because current audio CDs allow purchasers to exercise their fair-use right to make copies for personal use. The new formats do not.
Bill Gates, and Tablet PCs, have been everywhere these last few days. It makes me wonder whether Microsoft is abandoning the PocketPC market (and Windows CE, or PocketPC 2002, or whatever they're calling it this week).
I don't want a TabletPC. It runs Windows XP, which means the hardware requirements are way beyond anything that could be squeezed into an iPaq. And they cost $3,000.
I want something a little bigger than the iPaq (but not too much bigger), that runs five times faster with ten times the memory and a hundred times the storage. Alas, none such is available, or likely to become available any time soon.
A foolish man says:
Next election, all the negative ads won't stick because the US will have had two years of Republican leadership and people will be better off than they are today.
I don't dispute that in two years most people will be better off than they are now—but I don't believe that ‘leadership’, Republican or otherwise, will have much to do with it.
Interesting retro geektoy: it looks like the joystick from a 1970s Atari game console, but it's really the complete system (with ten games built in). Just plug it into your television and get all nostalgic over Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command, etc., etc.
No Tank Battle, though. (Floyd, where are you now?)
It's only $20. Just go to shop.avon.com and follow the links: Gifts > Children's > Games & Activities. Maybe I'll order one.
Uploaded the web site to Pair.com: patrick-rice.net is online, and seems to work pretty well.
When the time comes to switch permanently from Netcom to Pair.com, I'll leave the old pages up: but I'll add a this-site-has-moved notice at the top of each one, so as not to alienate the loyal readership.
Something bad has happened to Jerry Pournelle's web site: instead of a web page, I get an unidentifiable mass of binary data.
This looks interesting: Starved Rock Lodge, www.starvedrocklodge.com. Rent a cabin in the woods, only $85/night:
If you are looking for solitude, try one of our Pioneer Cabins. The Pioneer Cabins are located 150 yds. from the main lodge. .... Pioneer Cabins will have no television.
($85/night might not be quite accurate: there is such a bewildering array of getaways & packages, I got lost trying to figure it all out. There's one package where they deliver Champagne & Fudge to the room—though I don't suppose having both together would taste very good.)
Looked out my office window just now, and saw a bent contrail, trailing behind a jet that had just turned to a new heading.
I wonder why they do that. Surely at 35,000 feet there isn't much weather to go around—there's none today; I checked—so airliners should follow the cheapest route, i.e., the most direct one.
The only reasons I can think of for sudden turns far from any major airport are bad ones: emergency landing, hijacking, etc. My understanding of air travel must be faulty somehow.
I'm sure I've written about www.scopeware.com before: they have a file browser / indexer product, Scopeware, that looks for documents and displays them “in a time ordered stream”. This doesn't sound too useful to me.
[Indeed I did, on November 25th, 2001.]
Their site is currently overloaded & unresponsive (attracting the attention of the Slashdot crowd will do that), so I can't get in. Maybe tomorrow, if I remember.
Jake had his follow-up with the ophthalmologist this morning. Quoth the doctor, “He's fine.”
I do not want one of these: www.xentex.com. For one thing, it costs $5000. For another, it weighs twelve pounds. I suppose there might be people out in the world who are desperate for a dual-display notebook computer, but I'm not one of them.
(The Xentex site has one of those annoying Flash intro pages. I'm baffled as to why companies insist on throwing roadblocks like this in front of people who just want to visit their web site. It sends potential customers the message, We don't care why you came here, you will watch a commercial before we let you in.)
Haven't heard much about yesterday's elections, other than that the Republicans have taken Congress. (One imagines Republicans marching into the House & Senate chambers like Nazis into Paris.)
There's a Coke machine just down the hall from my office. It has six buttons, all labeled 'Coke'. It hasn't been restocked in quite a while, so the first three buttons report Sold Out when pressed. To get a can of Coke, you must press the fourth button labeled 'Coke'.
Duh.
It's too bad the machine doesn't know that all it has is Coke, so pressing any button could work so long as there are any cans left.
Hill Ford says, “No, the Check Engine light doesn't come on for scheduled maintenance. Better bring it in. How about Friday?”
Now is not a good time for expensive car repairs....
The Mozilla bugs database, which last November celebrated its 100,000th bug, is rapidly approaching bug number 200,000. Over on Slashdot, an apologist points out:
NOTE: Although almost 200,000 bugs have been reported, there are not—and have not been—that many bugs in Mozilla.
These are the people who got all worked up over the size of Microsoft's Windows bugs database, which—as of February, 2000—contained 65,000 bugs.
The number of records in the database doesn't matter as much as the number of actual bugs, and their severity. I've used Windows 2000 more than I've used Mozilla, but neither has given me much trouble.
Re-read my XHTML book & decided that <div> was more appropriate than <span>, so updated my CityDesk templates to use it.
I've had bad results with <div> before—in particular, Netscape 4.7x breaks badly when confronted with two of them arranged side-by-side. One hopes the current design won't tickle that particular Netscape bug. I'd hate to disappoint the loyal readership.
My public, how they adore me.
HTML Tidy no longer finds much to complain about in these pages, except for a few hundred
<caption> attribute "align" has invalid value "bottom"
...but I respectfully disagree with its judgment.
Now to dump everything to a CD for later uploading. Maybe I'll upload it to the Pair.com server & see how it works there. (It could hardly work worse than EarthLink's web server....)
Stayed up too last last night, but finished reading The Roads Between the Worlds, by Michael Moorcock: only three and a half months after I started it.
In today's mail: a get-well package for Jake from cousin Lily. Toys, a box of animal crackers, all sorts of things. Jake particularly liked the flashlight: he kept it on most of the evening, waving it around and watching the beam move.
Jennifer & I voted this evening (while Jake waited patiently nearby in his stroller). Lots of Republicans running unopposed this time, very puzzling.
Finished tidying up my HTML (for now). For some reason, HTML Tidy doesn't like how I'm using <span> tags. Since all 393 HTML files use <span>, this makes for a lot of bogus warnings.
Another annoying feature of Outlook 2000—of all Office 2000 applications, I suppose—is the Clipboard toolbar: it provides no functionality beyond the Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X keyboard shortcuts, it just pops up to annoy people who are trying to use the clipboard. When it does, it shifts the other toolbars down, and shrinks the client area of the document window. All this shuffling of screen elements is very distracting.
Fortunately, Knowledge Base Article Q207438 documents how to turn it off: in registry key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Common\Generalcreate a DWORD value named AcbControl and set its value
to 1.
(It should tell Microsoft something, that they need to document how to turn off so many of the Exciting New Features in their products. It should—but it probably doesn't.)
Tired this morning. Frustrated & unhappy. Thinking of a line from Moby Dick:
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; ... whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off....
(Though I wonder what Melville meant by “hypos”.)
Interesting: Vinod Valloppillil, Microsoft employee since 1996 and co-author of the infamous Halloween Document, has a web site: vinod.com. The older parts of it were created with FrontPage 2.0 (a.k.a. FrontPage 97, I believe), but the more recent parts were created with...CityDesk.
Dogfood doesn't taste very good, hm?
Ran these pages through HTML Tidy: lots of warnings. Looks like I have some work to do.
Turned about nine thousand <br> into
<br />. I sure wish CityDesk had a global
search/replace function.
Eyestrain...headache...must sleep....
Jake and I saw snow this morning, in the parking lot at Wal-Mart (where we had gone to pick up some laundry detergent and various other items [i.e., donuts]). First of the season, big soggy flakes drifting down. They didn't stick, nor did the snow last very long: mostly it just rained.
Coming back from Bloomington last night, the Check Engine light lit up on Mr. Explorer's dashboard. It was on today as well. Looks like I'll be calling the nice people at Hill Ford, first thing Monday morning.
Modem very flaky this afternoon. I guess all that updating & upgrading didn't do any good. (Except that it makes me suspect EarthLink's modems, or maybe the phone line itself, rather than my modem.)
HTML coding tip: instead of putting several
<p>...</p>
inside a single
<blockquote>...</blockquote>,
just use several consecutive
<blockquote>...</blockquote>.
I've been doing it wrong for years now. Oops....
Modem very unhappy this morning: it won't hold a connection for more than a minute or two at a time. Lots of redialing.
Updated the Weather section. There are some gaps in the data for October: apparently sputnik had some trouble communicating with the base station for a few hours one morning. (It seems to be fine now.)
Lunch was at the Original House of Pancakes, followed by an abbreviated trip to Curtis Orchard. The idea was to show Jake the kittens & goats and let him play outside for a while, but he fell asleep in the car on the way there.
I want a program that can rotate images: specifically .jpg files, though it would be nice if it could handle other formats. Just right-click on a file and see
Rotate left 90°
Rotate right 90°
in the context menu. A lot of digital camera images are sideways (because I held the camera sideways when taking the picture), and it bothers me.
Apparently the upcoming version of Office, unimaginatively code-named 'Office 11', won't run on anything older than Windows 2000 Service Pack 3. Windows 9x and NT users are out in the cold.
This is either an attempt to apply leverage to Windows 9x users—if you want Office 11, upgrade to XP—or a sign that the Office people just can't be bothered to support Windows 9x any more (just as many of Microsoft's games & applications teams couldn't be bothered to support Windows 2000).
Useful word from the Forgotten English calendar: clicketing. “A fox is said to go a-clicketing when he is desirous of copulation.” Now, there's a word I'm going to have to work into conversation more often.
Off to Bloomington this evening, for an impromptu Miller party. Jake & Natalie chased each other around the house while Clementine tried to lick people's faces.
Home today with Jacob, who isn't the least bit sick. Officially, he's recuperating from Wednesday's hospital visit, but he seems fine to me.
Upgraded my modem to V.92, installed new drivers. It seems to be helping: only one dropped connection so far today.
[Make that two dropped connections.]
The Pair.com people noticed that I gave a fake address &
telephone number when registering patrick-rice.net.
Well, yes—I don't want whois.pairnic.com
handing out my home address to any random spud with a web browser.
I gave them slightly more plausible information; we'll see whether they are satisfied with it. If not, goodbye vanity domain.
I see Butlerian Jihad, by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson, is in the stores. No, thanks: Dune: House Harkonnen was the final straw. I suppose there are people in the world so desperate for more Dune books that they'll read anything; I'm not one of them.
